


Stratastuck - Canopy

by 3amepiphany



Series: Drabbles 'n Bits [11]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Other, archaeology AU, humanstuck AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-15
Updated: 2017-08-15
Packaged: 2018-12-15 19:58:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11813133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/3amepiphany/pseuds/3amepiphany
Summary: This went on until Dave put his fork down and said a little too loud for his own liking, “I can get half.” The arguing stopped and he continued. “I can get half of what we think we’ll need if we go with Karkat and Sollux’s idea.“





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure what order these are supposed go in. 1 of 2.
> 
> http://genuscorvus.tumblr.com/post/55673366407/eugh-i-cant-work-on-this-anymore-for-the-moment

Dave sat up, stretching out his back and upper arms slowly so as to prevent suddenly pulling any muscles. It hadn’t gotten any cooler through the day, even with the cloud cover, and he was feeling the gentle caress of regret on the backs of his neck and legs. One quick glance down at his progress though reminded him that it was important that he was there, doing this work.

The small pile of hard-packed sediment he was carefully separating and amassing was an excellent indication that the item he was trying to excavate would be in fair or better shape than initially though, more than what Aradia had been anticipating before she had let him loose on the site with Sollux and Roxy’s data. He gently gathered his brushes and picks and placed them on the handkerchief he used to keep track of them, and then produced another faded and worn kerchief from his back pocket. Dave took a moment to pour a bit of his canteen onto it, wipe his face down, wet it again and tie it around his neck, doing all of this at an awkward angle over and away from the edge of his work area. He straightened completely and pulled himself up and out of the little hole.

-

It was roped off within its own grid block, only about three feet deep at the moment and almost square in shape, and while he normally had no issues staring down at the remains of Mesozoic era beasts in their own final resting places, a tense shiver tried to work its way down his spine. It went away after a second though, and he tugged the protective tarp over everything, shielding the tip of the broken femur sticking up out of the dirt.

It was currently lunch time. Well, past it a bit, but Dave never really cared to vie for seating under the tent right off the bat. Instead he would stay in his corner of the mapped grid and work away, listening to music when he would remember to give his mp3 player a charge or rapping quietly to himself when he wouldn’t. And when everyone would have had their fill and disappear for a smoke or a nap or whatever their own routines were, he’d make his way over to piece together a plate out of whatever the day’s fare was and use the quiet time away from digging to tend to his notes and digital photographs. Today though, the tent was still a raucous mess as Aradia and her regular crew were settling on a work plan to get them through the next few days’ forecast. The canopy she was having shipped in was stuck in customs again for the third day in a row and she was doing her best to procure a substitute or a new solution if necessary.

Karkat was speaking, loudly as he always was, which alone made Dave want to fix himself a plate of souvlaki and disappear into his accommodations and spend his lunch break checking the development of his analog negatives. From day one, this guy had grated on Dave’s nerves and he had run out of ways to counteract the noise about five major digs ago, the awful one where the incident-prone trip finally wrapped up after a trailer of their supplies (and some of Dave’s more flammable darkroom chemicals) and equipment on loan from a museum went up in flames. To Karkat’s credit he was willing to have Dave back if Aradia would keep them separated. And it had gone over pretty well for a while. Unfortunately on this dig, that had just been a lofty wish. They were quite content in simple avoidance at first but when the circumstances of the dig surfaced along with the geek-work and the necessity of Dave and his skill set became apparent, things around Karkat’s portions of the site were frigid if not barely civil. Aradia had given him a very stern talking to, but Dave hadn’t escaped it either.

He sat at the table with his meal, despite knowing he shouldn’t have. At that moment Aradia had the floor.

“But we can’t allocate more funds to that. We were done when we ordered the tent. That was it. What’s left is petty cash. Crocker can’t provide us with anymore and neither will the museum or the production execs.”

“They’ve given us enough so far. You’d think with the accommodations they’ve wasted on English they’d free that up for something more useful,” Vriska said quietly. At that, the entire dig crew looked up and around for errant joinees from the television team, not at all eager to strike up animosity at this point. After fixing some terse stares at her, they all turned to Feferi.

Karkat cleared his throat. “Is there any swaying him?“

Dave ate quietly, attention bent to his lunch, but he wasn’t surprised at all to learn that they were looking to bring Eridan in on another dig. Feferi was also silent, though with the smallest shrug she got everyone up and arguing over solutions. This went on until Dave put his fork down and said a little too loud for his own liking, “I can get half.” The arguing stopped and he continued. “I can get half of what we think we’ll need if we go with Karkat and Sollux’s idea.“

"You’re not paying for this out of pocket, Dave. It’s already enough that you’re here to assist, I can’t ask you to do that,” said Aradia.

He shook his head. “I’ve got a favor to call in, it’s not a big deal.“ Favor or not, with a single phone call he knew his oldest brother would be happy to help, especially now knowing that Dirk and his TV-host boyfriend had no more pull on their company sponsorship for the job. Jake did have the proclivity of refusing to use the prepaid, provided amenities, opting instead to gallivant around in tents and locals’ homes, much to Dirk’s mild annoyance.

"Fef, do you think that might make it a little easier to get Ampora in on this?”

“I hope so,” she said to Karkat, who was very obviously doing his best to keep from giving Dave a severe side-eye.


	2. Stratastuck - Documetary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jake put his hands in his pockets and shrugged. “You Striders never get tired of hearing yourselves talk, I don’t imagine you passing up invitations, ever.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 2/2. I put this up as the second bit bc dinner comes after lunch. idk.

“–and because of this, the calendar as we know it today would have had an extra 20 days. Three hundred and fifty million years have shaved that off, however, and not only leaves us with longer lengths of life-sustaining sunshine, but a vast expanse of questions regarding the creatures of the Carboniferous Era.”

Dave had to stop his work while Jake went on, and he simply set his brush down and rolled over onto his back, kicking his feet up and over the edge of the hole. It was finally too much. He had done well at this point to keep his mouth shut, to refrain from using his trowel to flick dirt at the back of Jake’s legs, to generally not be a nuisance, because it would mean that the filming of the continuous shot would have to start all over again. But damn, he was loud, and Dave was never really a fan of actually watching most television documentaries because they all seemed to rely on the same pip-pip-jolly-diddly-doo narrators, of which, almost what he would consider ironically, English was one. After few minutes, Jake went quiet, and then he felt someone kicking at his shoe. It was Dirk.

 

“Do you have a minute to talk to Jake about giant lizards today or do I have to go back to Aranea for stock discussion footage?” His heavy accent wasn’t as bad as their brother’s, whom Dave had hung up with a few hours earlier, but it was curt and tired in the same way when Bro wanted to make it clear that he wasn’t in for any shit today from anyone.

“Is this why you’ve had him ass-flush with my grid plot for the last hour?”

“It’s because you have the most complete item on site,” said Jake, now standing over him as well, moving carefully so as not to knock any dirt back down into the dig space.

Bringing his legs down and sitting up, Dave picked his brush back up and tapped it hard against the bottom of his boot, putting out a gloved hand to catch a little bit of the dirt falling out of the bristles and examining it in a weird mockery of the way he knew John to do it. “Do you ever feel like your life’s just a big BBC nature presentation? Even off-camera?”

“If you don’t want to, we can always come back over with Terezi and have her give a nice talk while we film you working.”

Dirk loved to use this tactic against him because it never failed. Terezi was almost as long-winded as Aranea, and despite her terrible and further declining eyesight, she still held a lot of merit for doing as much dig work as she could in between her epigraphy studies. He really enjoyed having her along (as did everyone else), however it was next to impossible for him to get much work done when she came to chat with him. She considered them pretty close and he considered them closer than that. Not as close as he was with Jake’s cousin Jade Harley, but right in the same niche of closeness as her brother John Egbert. Nicely close.

In any case he was hoping to get down to more of the remains before the digging tasks had to stop and everyone damped the breaks on their current tasks to help with the site preservation. The bags and tarpaulins they had ordered through the nearest in-country purveyors were on their way out to their adjacent town via freight courier so they would have them in time for the expected storm run if it was forecasted correctly and didn’t decide to show up a day early; the only issue that this was going to present was that everyone on hand, including the documentary crew, had to help stuff the bags, zip-tie them off, and then begin making a berm around the perimeter of the grid. With the tarps, they were going to create a makeshift shelter over everything using spare rebar and planks they had, foregoing the sturdy canvas tenting still sitting in customs and sacrificing an incredibly high amount of work space. Dave was sure that he’d never seen as much industrial duct tape outside of a Home Depot before as they had sitting on one of the tables near the catering trailer. It was going to be a huge undertaking, and in losing what would likely be a full day, plus the site prep in a few hours, it was going to be the first largest time setback any of them had had in a long while. No one was looking forward to it.

In fact, taking a moment to survey the rest of the site, it was easy to see that everyone not on a sleeping shift was of the same mind; they wanted to get as much done as they possibly could before they all had to crawl on their hands and knees through mud to get under the tarps and get back to their digging. He couldn’t see her currently. Just as well. As much as he wouldn’t mind simply doing that while Terezi playfully poked and prodded him with her walking stick, trying to get a reaction out of him so Dirk’s editors would have something to do, he knew she had work that she needed to tend to also and he didn’t want to pull her away from that. 

He said as much to Dirk before shifting back around to get comfortable. He almost reminded him of the impending workload, too, but he knew that Dirk knew. It was likely that this was a last push for a little good footage before they’d have to get their hands dirty as well. “Are you digging tonight?”

“Dunno. It depends on what kind of light rigging we can keep up and out. If we can do it at all or if we’ll have to break it down and bring out the Coleman lanterns. Can we wait and see how all of that’s going to go? I’m not trying to avoid you, honest.”

Jake put his hands in his pockets and shrugged. “You Striders never get tired of hearing yourselves talk, I don’t imagine you passing up invitations, ever.”

“We don’t,” the brothers said at the same time. They didn’t even flinch or wince at one another in doing so. Jake did.

“It’s nice to have the confirmation.”

“No,” said Dave, simply. “We don’t pass up invitations, ever.”

“Still a confirmation,” Jake muttered. Dirk shouldered the camera and nudged Jake. They said their goodbyes for the moment and headed back to their crew trailers. Dave waved them off with his free hand, adjusted his shades, and got back to the business of brushing gently at the dirt at the base of the expanse of bared bone. He had enough time to spare between now and site prep, before his dinner meeting with Aradia and Feferi, and he intended to kick some dirt ass.


End file.
